[ckan-dev] RFC: Releases support policy

Fri Jan 15 11:38:28 UTC 2016

Hi all,

One thing it is frequently mentioned as needing more clarity is the
predictability of upcoming releases and how long these are supported
for. Regarding the former, we have now settled to a roughly 3 month
cycle of smaller releases that hopefully we can keep in the future.

We now want to address the second aspect, to give developers and
maintainers a clear idea of when they should plan their upgrades,
avoiding having to support old versions and encourage upgrading to
more modern and stable versions.

Taking into account the resources available to the tech team, the
release cycle and the policies similar software projects have in
place, the tech team considers that supporting a release for 18 months
is a reasonable policy.

Here's a summary of the 2.x line release dates up until now, and what
the end of support date would be for each of them:

Version, Release Date, End of support date
CKAN 2.5, December 2015, June 2017
CKAN 2.4, July 2015, January 2017
CKAN 2.3, March 2015, September 2016
CKAN 2.2, February 2014, No longer supported
CKAN 2.1, August 2013, No longer supported
CKAN 2.0, May 2013, No longer supported

(You can see it nicely rendered here:
https://gist.github.com/amercader/e2d5bb06721da46c7a26)

We believe this is a fair and reasonable policy, but we also
understand that there are instances that might be stuck (hopefully
temporarily) in older versions. The main recommendation is to upgrade
(once your CKAN extensions target a modern version is much easier to
upgrade them). There may be other options for supporting older
versions like community supported forks, we can discuss them if there
is interest in
 this.

Please let us know your views or comments on this before we make it official.

Best,

Adrià